The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Jim Kelly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  A Selection of Titles by Jim Kelly

  The Detective Inspector Peter Shaw Series

  DEATH WORE WHITE

  DEATH WATCH

  DEATH TOLL

  DEATH’S DOOR *

  The Philip Dryden Series

  THE WATER CLOCK

  THE FIRE BABY

  THE MOON TUNNEL

  THE COLDEST BLOOD

  THE SKELETON MAN

  NIGHTRISE *

  THE FUNERAL OWL *

  * available from Severn House

  THE FUNERAL OWL

  Jim Kelly

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Jim Kelly.

  The right of Jim Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Kelly, Jim, 1957

  The Funeral Owl. – (A Philip Dryden mystery ; 7)

  1. Dryden, Philip (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Journalists–England–Cambridgeshire–Fiction.

  3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-049-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-461-4 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Michael Kelly

  Much-loved guardian of the family tree

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my agent, Faith Evans, for her particular help in the writing of The Funeral Owl. The version which appears here is infinitely superior to the one she first read, largely due to her intervention and advice. My publisher at Severn House, Kate Lyall Grant, has been especially supportive of the final – ambitious – text. I would also like to thank my editor, Sara Porter, for her usual care and attention to detail. Here, in Ely, my thanks go to my established support team. Jenny Burgoyne read the text and provided an invaluable overview and a final, fine, edit. Rowan Haysom read the proofs to check the plot. Any surviving mistakes are all my own. My wife, Midge Gillies, found time amidst her own busy writing schedule to offer advice on a regular basis over morning toast. My daughter, Rosa, contributes her own share of ideas, and opinions.

  I should point out that the township of Brimstone Hill does not exist. It may look like several fen villages and towns, but it is none of them. However, the Fen Motorway does exist, and all drivers should keep to the speed limit or risk death. The idea of building a plot around a painting hanging in a parish church came from Christ Church, Christchurch, near Wisbech. I would like to thank the church warden for showing me around. All the characters in The Funeral Owl are entirely fictitious.

  ONE

  Monday

  Philip Dryden gripped the fluffy wheel cover of the Capri and steered the car towards the broken white line in the middle of the road. To his left was an open grass verge, which quickly dropped away down a steep bank, ending fifteen feet below in the black waters of the Forty Foot Drain – one of the Cambridgeshire Fens’ endless, arrow-straight, artificial rivers. The trench in which the Forty Foot lay was like a long, grassy coffin, often sunless, a trap for mists and fog. Whatever the season – and today promised to be the latest in a series of perfect summer days – the water looked like black ice. For Dryden that was the nightmare detail; white water held nothing of the sinister tension of its black counterpart. The fear of slipping down into the river, the spectre of an airless death in a submerged car, seemed to draw him like a magnet, not of iron, but of hydrogen and oxygen. He knew it was an illusion but the Capri seemed to be tugging them towards the brink. Droplets of sweat beaded his high forehead. His knuckles were white and numb.

  They passed a sign on the left. It was blue, with white letters, as high as a house:

  On this road in the

  last two years:

  35 INJURED

  4 DEAD

  KEEP TO THE LIMIT

  The limit was thirty mph. Dryden was doing twenty mph. If he went any slower he’d stall. He was aware that driving was one of those skills that becomes almost subconscious, like riding a bicycle. Once you start thinking about it you fall off. He’d started thinking about it.

  He tried to stretch out his legs to give his six-foot-two-inch frame some release from being cramped into the front of the Capri. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the fear in his own eyes, which were green, like the worn shards of glass you find on a beach. Dryden’s face radiated a kind of intense stillness, but was handsome too beneath cropped jet-black hair; a strangely medieval face, architectural, as if fashioned by a series of mason’s blows. A face that should have been looking down from a cathedral roof, or up from a crusader’s tomb.

  Another roadside sign:

  RAMSEY FORTY FOOT

  8 MILES

  Eight miles. An eternity in tarmac, and slide-rule straight except for a single, obtuse, almost imperceptible kink to the left, halfway to the next village.

 
The road, known locally as the Fen Motorway, was just wide enough for two cars to pass; a rat-run linking Ely and the Black Fens to the flatlands around Peterborough, the silty expanse known as the Great Soak, a vast plain of treeless fields and ditches. The shortcut was often clogged with HGVs saving mileage, taxis avoiding rush-hour snarl-ups on the main roads, and locals who knew how to thread their way through the network of lanes which zigzagged the wetlands, clinging to the flood banks.

  The road had been built nearly four hundred years earlier on clay dredged from the river. Subsidence and slippage had wrecked the original flat surface. While it was straight in a two-dimensional plane, it was anything but in three dimensions. It undulated with an almost hypnotic rhythm, like a Möbius Strip. Dryden’s ear canals, as prone to flights of fantasy as the rest of him, sent him impossible signals, appearing to indicate that the cab was about to corkscrew like a roller coaster.

  The cab hit a dip and Boudicca, the greyhound, crouching in the back seat, howled once, then whimpered.

  Dryden gripped the wheel harder because ahead he could see a lorry, one of the big agricultural HGVs, thundering towards him. It was getting bigger at an alarming rate which suggested a speed roughly double the maximum allowed. Streamers flew from its stovepipe.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, to wet his mouth.

  The HGV swept past, the wind nudging the cab another foot towards the edge of the bank. Dryden swerved back to the safety of the white line. Then the wind, which had been a torment that summer, buffeted the cab further away from the water, so that for a moment he thought he was going to put them off the road on the far side, down a twenty-five-foot bank into a field – a descent which would have killed them just as surely as plunging into the Forty Foot.

  His passenger rearranged his sixteen-stone carcass in the bucket seat. Humph was the cabbie who usually drove the Capri. Always drove the car. Never left the car. Lived in it, really, if the fetid truth were told. But today, just a few miles back, Humph had pulled over and announced he couldn’t drive on.

  ‘Stress,’ he’d said. ‘You drive. I can’t see …’ He’d waved one of his small, delicate hands in front of his face as if cleaning an invisible windscreen.

  It was a big favour to ask. Dryden had not driven for more than a decade, since the day he’d pitched his car into a drain just like the Forty Foot. The two-door Corsa had sunk. He’d been pulled to safety by another driver. His wife, Laura, had been trapped on the back seat, underwater, for nearly an hour, surviving in an air pocket. She’d lived through it, and so had he, but they’d never be the same again. Which was why he hadn’t driven since, and why she always travelled in the front passenger seat.

  Humph’s mobile buzzed in his lap. He read the text. ‘She’s not at school,’ he said, his high voice furred with fear. Humph’s voice was like Humph, lighter than you’d expect, tiptoeing out of his small, round mouth.

  The cabbie’s eldest daughter, Grace, aged fifteen, was missing. The call had come that morning at 7.30 a.m. from Humph’s ex-wife. Grace lived with her mother and stepfather in Witchford, a village on the edge of Ely, in the heart of the Fens. She’d gone to her room on Sunday night before ten o’clock, saying she wanted to revise for an exam in bed. Usually diligent and cheerful, she’d been moody and withdrawn. Her mother had put it down to being a teenager. But at breakfast time she’d found the bed empty, still made up. Grace wasn’t at her best friend’s. She wasn’t with neighbours. Her mother rang Humph, who was sleeping in the Capri in a lay-by near Waterbeach, having spent the night ferrying clubbers home from Cambridge. Humph checked his house, a semi on Ely’s Jubilee Estate, because Grace had her own key. No sign. So he’d rung the police.

  Grace was level-headed, sensible, mature beyond her years, a kind of mezzanine mother to her younger sister Alice. And that’s what scared Humph. The fact that they’d found Alice, asleep, untroubled, in the box room next to her sister’s. The two were inseparable. Until now. Why had Grace gone? Where had she gone? Humph had a limited emotional range, so the signals he was getting from his brain, and from his heart, were overwhelming. The simple idea that he might lose Grace, that the last time he’d seen her might be the last time he’d ever see her, made his whole body ache. He had to make an effort to remember to breathe. It was as if he was trapped in a slow-motion accident, unable to escape from this odd, echoey, world until Grace was found. And lurking in his subconscious was the alternative outcome. That the nightmare would begin when they found Grace.

  Dryden wound his window down, aware that his body heat was misting the windscreen. The wind, which had blown from the east since the spring, filled the car with a blast of hot air. Boudicca sat up and stared at Dryden in the rear-view mirror, panting.

  The satnav told them to go straight on at the approaching junction. The electronic voice was a woman’s, with a Blue Peter accent.

  ‘Ignore her. Take a right here,’ said Humph, pulling the cable out of the gadget.

  The cabbie seemed to make a decision then, flipping down the glove compartment and taking out a miniature bottle of white wine. He collected them on his frequent trips to and from Stansted Airport. He looked at the label as if the vineyard made a difference. He checked his watch: 9.34 a.m. He put the bottle back unopened.

  ‘Good call,’ said Dryden.

  He ran down through the gears, making a hash of slipping into first, then swung right, away from the lethal water. This road continued to run on a high bank, but there were fields on either side, which ran hedgeless to a hazy horizon. Dryden breathed out in a long shudder, letting tension bleed away. He flexed his neck and one of the bones in his spine cracked like a pistol shot.

  They zigzagged on flood banks until they reached a long stretch bounded on one side by a line of poplars – hundreds of them, running for a mile, thrashing in the wind, as if trying to break free of their roots. The breeze nudged the car too, like a giant boxing glove, jabbing from the east.

  The sun was up, already hot, and they flashed from shade to light, from light to shade, as they passed the trees.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said Dryden. ‘She’ll have gone for a secret sleepover with a friend. Kids do that these days.’

  Dryden’s own son was one year old. When it came to teenage girls he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Humph, a slight lift in his spirits making the grip of his headache release just a notch.

  A great change had come over the landscape within a few hundred yards. The black peat soil had gone, replaced by the silty fields of the Great Soak – pale, bleached, tinder dry. Some of the fields were dressed with fertiliser, a white powder which made it almost painful to let the light into the eye.

  ‘Turn by the bins,’ said Humph.

  The bins stood at a corner of a turning, just a dusty track, set off at precisely ninety degrees, part of the mathematical grid which seemed to underpin the landscape.

  Dryden noted the name of the lane: Euximoor Drove. ‘Droves’ were the narrow fen lanes, sometimes just dirt tracks, a network leading to a thousand dead ends. This one ran half a mile to the ruin of a farm. Beside it stood a 1950s bungalow, wooden window frames, double chimney pots, a pitched tiled roof. It must have been built on a concrete raft in the silt because the whole thing had tipped a few degrees from true, as if at any moment it might just slip beneath the soil.

  Dryden turned off the drove towards the bungalow. Ahead the road ran on in an infinite straight line along which were strung a few more houses, a chapel, a farm. This was the hamlet of Euximoor Drove, thirty houses sprinkled along a straight line.

  Dryden put the handbrake on and killed the engine, already telling himself he’d been fine driving, that he could keep the fear in check. But the air was heavy with the smell of anxiety – sweat and a hint of electricity, like a blown plug.

  Humph struggled out of the Capri. The dog followed, bounding to the house.

  A grey-haired woman was already on the doorstep. Overweight, fleshy, in boots and
shapeless jeans. The sun caught the washing-up suds she was trying to shake from her hands.

  ‘Mum,’ said Humph, walking towards her on balletic feet. ‘I’ve been ringing. You’re not wearing your hearing aids, are you?’ Humph’s shoulders slumped and Dryden knew him well enough to sense that he was fighting the urge to blame her for the missing girl, her grandchild.

  And for her, so much more than a grandchild. Humph’s long and acrimonious divorce had meant his daughters had spent a lot of their childhoods out here on Euximoor Fen. Grace and her grandmother had shared tears over the collapse of what had been a happy family. Most of all they’d shared the job of shielding young Alice from too much of the brutal truth: her mother’s adultery and her father’s inability to rebuild a life beyond the artificial confines of a 1985 Ford Capri coupé.

  Meg smiled as she strained to hear.

  He took her hands and spelt it out: ‘Grace has run away from home. Is she here?’

  She covered her small mouth with both of her hands, shaking her head, then looked back at the house.

  ‘I’ll check,’ he said, brushing past. ‘She might have snuck in.’

  Dryden stood by the Capri.

  Meg Humphries looked around her smallholding as if Grace would be there, so far unseen, amongst the beanpoles and rhubarb. ‘Where could she be, Philip?’ she asked. ‘I don’t understand – why? Why run away?’

  Dryden shrugged. ‘She’ll turn up. I know she will. The police are looking too.’

  ‘The police?’ she echoed, drying her hands on her jeans.

  Dryden was running the numbers through his head: the chances she’d turn up were falling sharply with each passing hour, each minute. A fifteen-year-old girl, missing for nearly twelve hours. Had she run away? Would she come back? There was a chance they’d never know where she’d gone. She’d been unhappy. She’d lied. She might hurt herself.

  The cabbie appeared at the side of the house, pulling open an outhouse door, then walking to a coal bunker, moving quickly, balancing his weight with an almost theatrical finesse. He left doors open behind him, each one a token of how important Grace was, and how unimportant the doors.